Four suspects in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021 were extradited to the United States on Tuesday, January 31, US authorities announced. The three Haitian-Americans and the Colombian who were detained in Haiti will be presented on Wednesday to a federal judge in Miami, who will set out the charges against them, according to a press release from the Department of Justice. Before them, three men had already been transferred to the United States to answer for this assassination.
Jovenel Moïse, 53, was shot dead by an armed commando on the night of July 6 to 7, 2021 in his private residence in Port-au-Prince, without his bodyguards intervening. His death had further aggravated the chaos in this small poor country in the Caribbean. The Haitian police had quickly arrested about forty suspects, including twenty former Colombian soldiers, recruited according to them by a security company based in Florida, the CTU. The investigation then stumbled on the shortcomings of the local judicial system.
American justice, competent to judge the conspiracies hatched on its soil, took over. After the first three suspects, she charged two Haitian-American nationals, James Solages, 37, and Joseph Vincent, 57, and Colombian German Rivera, 44, with "conspiracy to commit murder or kidnapping." outside of American soil". In a separate indictment, she is suing Christian Sanon, a 54-year-old man who also has dual American-Haitian citizenship and harbored "political ambitions" in Haiti, for "illegal export of goods from the United States." United ".
A "private militia"
Concretely, American justice accuses James Solages and Christian Sanon of having discussed, during a meeting in Florida in April 2021, a change of regime in Haiti. At the end of their meeting, a list of weapons, including rifles, machine guns, grenades, etc. had been shared.
A month later, Christian Sanon was ordering equipment for his "private militia", a force of about 20 Colombians led by German Rivera and supposed to ensure his security in Haiti. In June 2021, he had sent around twenty bulletproof vests to Haiti, without complying with the formalities of American customs – which he is now accused of.
According to the press release, James Solages, Joseph Vincent and German Rivera met on July 6, 2021 near the president's house for a weapons distribution and the former announced that the purpose of the mission was to kill Jovenel Moïse. . The three men face life imprisonment, and Christian Sanon, a 20-year prison sentence.
